Are you a high performer? Or a problem to be managed out? Find out where you stand with the Performance-Maintenance Matrix

In every film about the concrete jungle, there comes a moment when the protagonist makes a small, toxic bargain to achieve success. Usually, a manager is involved, and so is a compromised conscience. The question, however, is never whether their integrity survives intact, only how much of it gets traded in before the third act. In fiction, the fallout is dramatic, but in real life, it is procedural, because it takes the form of a performance review instead.

Interestingly, Samuel Culbert, a professor of management and organisations at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, published a book in 2010 with the admirably unsubtle title Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing — and Focus on What Really Matters. His argument was simple: annual performance reviews breed fear, intimidation, and inauthenticity (often, on both ends), while doing almost nothing to measure what employees are actually contributing to their organisations. In other words, the ritual is elaborate, but the insight, less so.

Back on home ground, the numbers are not especially flattering. In a 2019 survey by recruitment agency Randstad, 15 per cent of its respondents said they were never asked for feedback during their performance appraisals. Pair that with the 47 per cent who said reviews were conducted only once a year, and the score or rank that eventually appears on an employee’s sheet starts to feel faintly ceremonial—as though it had been decided by the ‘vibes’ of a manager’s mood before the appraisal. 

What is the Performance-Maintenance Matrix?

Enter the Performance–Maintenance Matrix, a four-part employee framework devised by Ashkan Nourzadeh, a CTO and engineering consultant. It is, admittedly, not the warmest way to think about a person, as it treats the measure of an employee’s potential progression down to two factors: performance and maintenance. The former is about the quality and quantity of someone’s output, while the latter measures how much effort is required from everyone else to manage them. 

It is a little mechanical, yes, especially considering the rising AI-fication of girl bosses, though not appreciably colder than most workplace systems that claim to be “people-first” while subtly keeping scores through micro-aggressions.

Still, it does something many performance reviews do not. Rather than reducing an employee to vague objectives and arbitrary self-assessments — “demonstrates leadership potential” versus “room to improve stakeholder management” — it allows for narrative feedback that is grounded in actual behaviour and actual outcomes. 

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Are your performance reviews too vague?

In 2024, a study by the Harvard Business Review noted that this kind of specific, example-based feedback gives both employees and managers a clearer sense of what is working, what is not, and where problems begin. Which is more than can be said for most annual reviews, where everyone leaves a meeting room pretending the phrases “growth mindset” and “greater visibility” mean something measurable.

Obviously, none of this eliminates the oldest problem found in an office: employees may think they are better at their jobs than everyone else is. But whether the rubric comes from a consulting firm (the true villains of The Devil Wears Prada sequel) or from Nourzadeh’s matrix, disappointment remains one of corporate life’s more dependable outputs. Which is why something far less glamorous may be more useful: frequent check-ins.

Why small check-ins are more helpful than annual reviews

Back in 2012, Adobe Systems scrapped annual performance reviews in favour of an ongoing system of “check-ins”—a less theatrical arrangement involving regular feedback, coaching, expectation-setting, and growth opportunities. In practice, it meant managers and employees set goals, clarify responsibilities, and review progress throughout the year. 

On paper, it sounds more time-consuming, but in practice, it is probably less exhausting than preparing for the pageant of self-justification and pretending it can account for twelve months of work. More importantly, Adobe found that these check-ins helped support development-focused conversations—the kind that are actually useful, and the kind that a framework like the Performance–Maintenance Matrix can help articulate, provided everyone involved is willing to be a little more honest than usual. 

Below, a breakdown of the Performance–Maintenance Matrix, along with prompts we’ve created to make the thing a little less abstract and, ideally, a little more honest.

The Performance-Maintenance Matrix Archetypes

1. High Performance, Low Maintenance (The ideal)
2. High Performance, High Maintenance
3. Low Performance, Low Maintenance
4. Low Performance, High Maintenance

1. High Performance, Low Maintenance (The dream hires)

In Nourzadeh’s Performance–Maintenance Matrix, the High Performance, Low Maintenance employee is the corporate ideal: the employee who takes initiative, communicates clearly, solves problems before anyone schedules a meeting about them, and adapts as the work shifts under their feet. Nourzadeh also notes that they tend to contribute positively to team culture, which is office shorthand for being competent while creating good vibes.

Questions for employees:

• If you see yourself in the high-performance, low-maintenance quadrant, are you being recognised for it or simply being rewarded with more work?
• Are you genuinely low-maintenance, or have you just become good at not asking for help?
• Do you communicate clearly and early when something is off, or do you keep quiet until everyone assumes you’re fine?

Questions for managers

• According to the matrix, who in your team consistently performs well without demanding disproportionate time or reassurance from everyone else?
• Are you recognising these employees properly, or just leaning on them because they are less trouble than the others?
• When someone appears low-maintenance, have you checked whether they are genuinely thriving or simply too self-contained to raise problems? 

2. High Performance, High Maintenance (The star with a cost)

This is where things get more expensive, though not necessarily in payroll. In Nourzadeh’s matrix, the High Performance, High Maintenance employee produces excellent work, sometimes spectacularly so, while also requiring enough reassurance, handling, and interpersonal cleanup to qualify as a second job for their manager. Over time, as Nourzadeh points out, these are also often the people organisations keep for their output and quietly bypass when it comes to leadership.

Questions for employees

• Do you need frequent reassurance because the job is genuinely demanding, or because praise has become part of your operating system?
• When feedback arrives, do you genuinely take it in, or do you treat it like a personal attack?
• When collaboration breaks down, do you often assume the issue is that other people are slower or less competent than you?

Prompt questions for managers

• According to Nourzadeh’s matrix, is this person’s performance still outweighing the amount of energy required to manage them?
• Are you tolerating corrosive behaviour because the work is good, or because replacing competence feels inconvenient?
• If this person were slightly less talented, would you still be making the same allowances?

3. Low Performance, Low Maintenance (The one who is coasting)

Every office has a few people who belong to the Low Performance, Low Maintenance quadrant in Nourzadeh’s Performance–Maintenance Matrix—employees who meet the basic requirements of the job, keep their heads down, and manage not to trouble anyone too much in the process. Nourzadeh’s point is that while these employees are not catastrophic, they contribute very little to momentum, innovation, or the broader direction of a team.

Questions for employees

• Are you quietly dependable, or have you simply become very good at doing just enough?
• When was the last time you stretched your skills and contribution beyond the minimum rather than settling neatly into it?
• If the role changed tomorrow, or you got a promotion, would you be ready for it or surprised?

Questions for managers

• Is this employee genuinely steady, or simply underperforming without making enough noise to attract attention?
• In a slower, steadier team, are they perfectly adequate, and in a reshuffle, actually at risk?
• Are they low-maintenance because they are self-sufficient, or because no one expects very much from them anymore?

4. Low Performance, High Maintenance (The problem hire)

This is the quadrant no one enters by accident, and no manager discusses without documentation nearby. In Nourzadeh’s Performance–Maintenance Matrix, the Low Performance, High Maintenance employee underperforms while also requiring an outsized amount of supervision, reassurance, correction, or repair. According to Nourzadeh, organisations usually move fairly quickly here: performance improvement plans, closer oversight, and, if nothing changes, an exit. 

Question for employees

• When feedback arrives, do you hear information — or immediately start defending the version of events that flatters you most?
• Are you underperforming because the role is a mismatch, or because you have stopped taking responsibility for how you show up in it?
• If the same issues keep resurfacing, are you genuinely working on them — or just getting better at talking around them?

Questions for managers

• Is this employee struggling in a way that can still be coached, or has the maintenance cost already eclipsed the value of retaining them?
• Are you offering clear, specific support, or just circling the same underperformance with slightly different wording each quarter?
• Is this a skills problem, a motivation problem, or a behaviour problem conveniently disguising itself as one of the first two?